Los Angeles Gangs Metastasizing

Peter Landesman at LA Weekly has written a disturbing account of Los Angeles gangs and how they're spreading through the country like cancer. From the article, it seems like step one in combating this menace would be eliminating the public housing these gangs seem to center on.

Families like Daisy’s have nowhere to turn. Though the projects are federal property, the Bounty Hunter Bloods and Grape Street Crips don’t just live there, they also run them.

“If you want to live in Jordan Downs you do not ask the housing authority or the city for permission, you ask the Grape Street gang,” says civil rights attorney Connie Rice. “When Latino families call the housing authorities to complain, the staff, the housing authorities call the Grape Street Crips.”

Grape Street Crips and Bounty Hunters pay residents $1,000 a month plus rent and moving expenses to use their apartments as crack kitchens and dope shops. “The gangs have control of public property for god’s sake!” says Rice. “And they terrorize everybody in there, family after family after family!”

Interestingly, there may be a relationship between childhood sexual abuse and gang activity, just as there appears to be between childhood sexual abuse and homosexuality.

Sherills told me he became a gangbanger because he was sexually molested. “But that’s taboo,” he said. “You don’t say that. Feeling worthless, like you are an object. In this neighborhood 90 percent of young men have been sexually abused. I will say 99 percent of ladies. Everybody is operating within the cloud. It’s the elephant that is sitting in the room that no one speaks of.”

The urban gang culture is depraved and disgusting, and we owe it to those caught in its web to eradicate it.